| Abstrakt: | My doctoral dissertation focuses on Icelandic literature and society from around 1150–1550 in the
context of the reception and reinterpretation of Latin/Ancient Roman culture in mediæval Icelandic
texts after the late introduction of non-runic written culture in Scandinavia. The purpose of the thesis
is to discuss the possible Latin/Ancient Roman influences on Old Norse-Icelandic literature, language,
mentality, and identity. It employs Rómverja saga as an example, along with the related Latin and Old
Norse-Icelandic literature. Rómverja saga is a collection of Old Norse translations of selected ancient
Latin works: Sallust’s Bellum Iugurthinum and De coniuratione Catilinae, and Lucan’s De Bello
Civili.
The chronological framework I set up for my thesis extends from as early as the second half of
the 12th century (the composition of Rómverja saga has often been dated to around 1180), to as late as
the half of 14th century, when the preserved manuscripts were produced (ÁM 595 a-b 4o , ÁM 225 fol.
and ÁM 226 fol.). The mediæval manuscript ÁM 595 a–b 4o contains an earlier, fragmented version of
Rómverja saga, (“The history of the Romans”). The younger and complete, although abridged version,
is preserved in the manuscripts ÁM 225 fol. and ÁM 226 fol. When the research is necessitated by the
problems of reception, I venture beyond these chronological boundaries to the time of transition from
the medieval to the early modern period in Iceland (ca. 1550).
Until recently, Rómverja saga was little studied. Over the years, Rómverja saga manuscripts
have been edited by Konráð Gíslason (1860), Meißner (1910), and, most recently, Þorbjörg
Helgadóttir (2010). The research on Rómverja saga manuscripts, including, the questions of dating
(and the text itself), manuscript authorship, ownership and provenance, and the narrative’s connections
to Sverris saga and Veraldar saga has been conducted by Meißner (1903), Hofmann (1986), Þorbjörg
Helgadóttir (1987–1988; 1996), Hermann Pálsson (1988; 1991), Gropper (Würth) (1998; 2009),
Robertson (2004), Stoltz (2009), and Wellendorf (2014).
My approach, however, reaches beyond these questions. I examine the place of Rómverja saga
in the cultural transfer of knowledge and learning, as well as the saga’s place in the civilising process
of the Europeanisation of Scandinavia.
Latin or Ancient Roman culture had flowed into Scandinavia via waves of texts from the
South. Literary contacts between continental Europe and Scandinavia started as early as the
Christianisation of the North. Powerful currents of Latin learning and continental European culture can
be traced in Iceland from that period onwards. The North underwent Christianisation, the first
profound colonial civilising process, in the 11th and 12th centuries. The region opened up to Latin
culture, and later to the courtly culture and the primary intellectual stream of the Middle Ages in
Europe – translatio studii et imperii, the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge – the transfer of written
knowledge through translation – between the societies of Europe. Rómverja saga is an intriguing manifestation of the Europeanisation of the mediæval North
through the means of translation. By focusing on this ‘displaced’ text, an Old Norse-Icelandic
translation/compilation of several Latin/Ancient Roman texts, I intend to examine the cultural
connections between the two seemingly unrelated periods, namely Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and
places: the Roman Empire and the Viking-Age and mediæval Scandinavian kingdoms and the
Icelandic Commonwealth. This dissertation aims to describe how specific Latin manuscripts holding
ancient Roman texts were imported from continental Europe to Scandinavia and Iceland to the certain
monasteries and cathedral schools, the cathedral at Skálaholt and the Þingeyrar monastery. There, they
ended up in the hands of monks who not only used them to teach Latin and possibly history, but also
translated Latin texts into vernacular. Further consequence of the importation of manuscripts is the
influence the process yielded on the production of texts in situ, the education of the country’s
intellectual elites, and social change sensu largo: in mindset and identity.
I primarily focus on the main intellectual stream of the Middle Ages in Europe – translatio
studii, cultural transfer or cross-cultural exchange of knowledge and learning between societies in
Europe. I also examine the ‘cultural imperialism’ that helped the Catholic Church and the continental
monarchies gain influence across Northern Europe. Through these cultural means, they were inducing
those within their sphere of influence to imitate the forms and values of the dominant culture.
I reflect on the mediæval Icelanders' pursuit of knowledge of the South and Greco-Roman
Antiquity as a deliberate activity undertaken at all levels: starting with the import of manuscripts,
translation and reading practices, intertextual relations, all the way to changes in social cognition,
mentality, and identity.
Preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion, my dissertation is divided into five
chapters. The introduction pertains to the background of cultural transfer: people, places, trails,
institutions, chronology, locations, and manuscripts. It also establishes the methodical and theoretical
background of my approach to the Icelandic sagas and ancient Roman literature. Throughout my
discussion I refer to a number of theoretical perspectives employed in fields such as linguistics,
literary studies, and history. The research undertaken in this study is based upon methodological
principles set out by postcolonial theory, reader-response criticism, theory of intertextuality, material
philology, approaches to cognitive linguistics as established by George Lakoff, and approaches to
historical cognitive linguistics by Andreas Musolff. These theories enabled me to look at Rómverja
saga from multiple angles. The resulting portrait is that of a complex phenomenon featuring material,
textual, intertextual, linguistic, and socio-cultural dimensions of the text.
The first chapter is a textual analysis of Rómverja saga addressing the question of what
became of the ancient Roman text that would eventually be translated by a mediæval Icelander.
Digging into the textual strata of this case of cultural transfer, I open up an intertextual perspective.
The underlaying question is: what happened to this cultural product that moved through time and
space to emerge and become enshrined in new contexts and configurations? What are the differences
between the original text and the target text? How did the translator re-read the text? The translator,
confronted with the texts of foreign linguistic, sociohistorical, cultural and literary origins, as ancient
Rome must have been to a mediæval Icelander, had to decode the text and translate it not only from a
foreign language into their own but also from a foreign cultural context into their own. Differences
and tension within the text indicate the presence of conflicting discourses. This is particularly valid not
only within the interfaces of cultures and languages that collide in the translated text but especially in
the case of a text that was thought as a compilation of texts; texts that had originated in different
ideological contexts. How did the compiler of Rómverja saga resolve the contradiction between the
republican Sallustius and the antimonarchist Lucanus, whose works have radical republican and
antimonarchical ideological implication, and his own Icelandic literary milieu, whose writings have
conservative and monarchist ideological implications? In this part of my dissertation, I explore omissions, additions, and other modifications that indicate shifts in ideology, from anti-royalist to
monarchist, and the differences in values and morals between ancient Romans and mediæval
Icelanders.
In the second chapter, I analyse the social milieu of identified readers of Rómverja saga and
owners of the Rómverja saga manuscripts from a prosopographical perspective to define the target
group of readers of Rómverja saga in the Middle Ages. As a sample I refer to a group of 30 late
mediæval and early modern readers identified on the basis of marginal notes left by them in the
Rómverja saga manuscripts. This group of readers consisted of landowners with hereditary lands or
land grants, often civil officers of high rank or clergymen, parish priests and bishops. Many of them
educated in the Icelandic cathedral schools or abroad at the European universities or cathedral schools,
learners of Latin as a second language, all of them males with one exception for a woman.
The third chapter examines the intertextual relations surrounding Rómverja saga and
addresses how the saga became intertwined with vernacular Icelandic literature. On the basis of
citations of the Rómverja saga text, I propose the dating to the third quarter of the 12th century,
contrary to the latest dating argued by Jonas Wellendorf – AD 1250-1350, and the localisation of the
text itself (the cathedral at Skálaholt or the Þingeyrar monastery), the functions of the text (history
textbook), and the literary milieu of the author (a learned monastic environment).
In the fourth chapter, I focus on the strata of the social cognition as resembled by the language
of the Old Icelandic and Latin texts, looking for traces of Latin-Old Norse interfaces, the encounters of
these two conceptual worlds and their interactions in the vernacular Icelandic literature as a
consequence of the influence of Rómverja saga. With the flow of Latin learning to Iceland, the Old
Norse-Icelandic conceptual world did not remain intact. The classics imported from the South and the
Latin language had an important influence on the mediæval Northern World. Through translation,
mediæval Icelanders incorporated European culture into their own, which made them not only familiar
with continental European culture but also enabled them to identify with the region. Therefore, in the
following part of my dissertation, I also seek to answer the following questions: to what extent was
Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature, in the sense of semantics/meaning, influenced by Latin
language and literature? Changes in mentality came hand-in-hand with language change, but what
precisely was the influence of classical ideas on Old Norse-Icelandic thought? Might these ideas have
been to a certain degree integrated into the mentality of mediæval Icelanders? Or at least the mentality
of certain groups inside mediæval Icelandic society? In my dissertation, I explore these questions
while looking for evidence of the transfer of social norms in the form of cognitive metaphors from
continental Europe as they are found in the Sagas of Antiquity (Antikensagas) and the vernacular
sagas. The research in this part of my dissertation focuses on social cognition in the context of Latin
and Old Norse-Icelandic literature and language, their interfaces, the cross-cultural adaptation of
cognitive structures (a process wherein a bit of cultural information is brought into a society), its
existing schemata, existing meaning structures, and how it may be subsequently accommodated and
assimilated into the social structure, causing changes in mentality and worldview. In order to see the
network of beliefs and attitudes (connected with the worldview of the cultural community from which
it stems) which underlie Rómverja saga and its texti recepti, Sallustius and Lucanus (and which would
be otherwise invisible while always implicit in the texture of the saga), I dig deeper into the text and
its language to find cognitive structures and metaphors. Using as examples works by Lucanus and
Sallustius, and works such as Rómverja saga and other Antikensagas, as well as related vernacular Old
Norse-Icelandic literature, I consider the following: First, if and how were these cultural concepts
translated from Latin to Old Norse-Icelandic? Second, how was meaning changed, accommodated, or
adapted? Third, to what extent was Old Norse-Icelandic language, in the sense of semantics and
meaning, influenced by Latin? Fourth, might these Ancient Roman-Latin ideas have been to a certain
degree integrated into the mentality of mediæval Icelanders (or at least the worldview of certain groups inside mediæval Icelandic society)? Fifth, if yes, in what way was the mentality of mediæval
Icelanders affected by these concepts? Examples of four conceptual metaphors present in the
mediæval Icelandic literature are given and analysed as culturally transferred notions of Latin/ Ancient
Roman provenance: FORTUNE AS A WHEEL, FATE AS A WOVEN CLOTH, SOCIETY AS A BODY, and
RULER AS A FATHER OF FATHERLAND.
The fifth chapter concerns the mediæval theory of Trojan origins of Scandinavians as an
example of a hybridised identity and examines the uses of Rómverja saga as a source text in its
development. Literature is actively involved in the making of society. It plays a significant role in
discursive practice. Texts participate in creating the cultural moment from which they originated and
in which they were read, and should be associated with other phenomena in society that occurred
during a given period. Literature produces cultural effects. The truly important feature of this
phenomenon is the creation of hybrid cultures open to continued changes. Therefore, we should read
cultural transfer in terms of ‘cultural transplantation’: elements become grafted from one ‘cultural
body’ to another and are in turn adapted to new cultural environments. Through an assimilationist
attitude towards foreign language and culture – Latin in the case of mediæval Scandinavia – it was
willingly and knowingly embraced by leading mediæval Icelandic intellectuals as a modus operandi of
the society's Europeanisation. Ultimately, a kind of hybrid identity was developed in the North from
following substrates: Old Norse oral tradition, Christianity, and continental Latin culture. They
merged in the mediæval Icelandic society embedded deeply in the pre-Christian traditions, but
strongly influenced by Christianity and Latinity. |